4 ms·

Playing back large passages of verbatim content sold as your “product” without citation is almost certainly not fair use. Fair use would be saying “The New York

by JCM9 3y ago

Playing back large passages of verbatim content sold as your “product” without citation is almost certainly not fair use. Fair use would be saying “The New York Times said X” and then quoting a sentence with attribution. Thats not what OpenAI is being sued for. They’re being sued for passing off substantial bits of NYTimes content as their own IP and then charging for it saying it’s their own IP. This is also related to earlier studies about OpenAI where their models have a bad habit of just regurgitating training data verbatim. If your trained data is protected IP you didn’t secure the rights for then that’s a real big problem. Hence this lawsuit. If successful, the floodgates will open.

ethbr1 3y ago
At the root, it seems like there's also a gap in copyright with respect to AI around transformative. Is using something, in its entirety, as a tiny bit of a massive data set, in order to produce something novel... infringing? That's a pretty weird question that never existed when copyright was defined.
- layer8 3y ago
  Replace the AI model by a human, and it should become pretty clear what is allowed and what isn’t, in terms of published output. The issue is that an AI model is like a human that you can force to produce copyright-infringing output, or at least where you have little control over whether the output is copyright-infringing or not.
  - bawolff 3y ago
    Its less clear than you think, and comes down more on how OpenAI is commercially benefiting and competiting with NYT than what they actually did. (See four factors of fair use)
- bawolff 3y ago
  I think it did come up back in the day sort of, for example with libraries. More importantly, ever case is unique so what really came up was a set of principles for what defines fair use, which will definitely guide this.
aragonite 3y ago
> They’re being sued for passing off substantial bits of NYTimes content as their own IP and then charging for it saying it’s their own IP. In what sense are they claiming their generated contents as their own IP? https://www.zdnet.com/article/who-owns-the-code-if-chatgpts-ai-helps-write-your-app-does-it-still-belong-to-you/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/who-owns-the-code-if-chatgpts-... > OpenAI (the company behind ChatGPT) does not claim ownership of generated content. According to their terms of service, "OpenAI hereby assigns to you all its right, title and interest in and to Output." https://openai.com/policies/terms-of-use https://openai.com/policies/terms-of-use > Ownership of Content. As between you and OpenAI, and to the extent permitted by applicable law, you (a) retain your ownership rights in Input and (b) own the Output. We hereby assign to you all our right, title, and interest, if any, in and to Output.
- _aavaa_ 3y ago
  They can’t transfer rights to the output of it isn’t theirs to begin with. Saying they don’t claim the rights over their output while outputting large chunks verbatim is the old YouTube scheme of upload movie and say “no copyright intended”.
  - JCM9 3y ago
    Exactly. And while one can easily just take down such a movie if an infringement claim is filed it’s unclear how one “removes” content from a trained model given how these models work. Thats messy.
    - _aavaa_ 3y ago
      If it’s found that the use of the material is infringing on the rights of the copyright holder than the AI company has to retrain their model without any material they don’t have a right to. Pretty clear to me
      - logicchains 3y ago
        By that logic Microsoft Word should have to refuse to save or print any text that contained copyrighted content. GPT is just a tool; the user who's asking it to produce copyrighted content (and then publishing that content) is the one violating the copyright, and they're the ones who should be liable.
shkkmo 3y ago
I would note that in the examples the NYT cites, the prompts explicitly ask for the reproduction of content. I think it makes sense to hold model makers responsible when their tools make infringement too easy to do or possible to do accidentally. However that is a far cry from requiring a little longer license to do the trainint in the first place.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

by JCM9 3y ago

ethbr1 3y ago

At the root, it seems like there's also a gap in copyright with respect to AI around transformative. Is using something, in its entirety, as a tiny bit of a massive data set, in order to produce something novel... infringing? That's a pretty weird question that never existed when copyright was defined.

layer8 3y ago
Replace the AI model by a human, and it should become pretty clear what is allowed and what isn’t, in terms of published output. The issue is that an AI model is like a human that you can force to produce copyright-infringing output, or at least where you have little control over whether the output is copyright-infringing or not.
- bawolff 3y ago
  Its less clear than you think, and comes down more on how OpenAI is commercially benefiting and competiting with NYT than what they actually did. (See four factors of fair use)
bawolff 3y ago
I think it did come up back in the day sort of, for example with libraries. More importantly, ever case is unique so what really came up was a set of principles for what defines fair use, which will definitely guide this.

aragonite 3y ago

> They’re being sued for passing off substantial bits of NYTimes content as their own IP and then charging for it saying it’s their own IP. In what sense are they claiming their generated contents as their own IP? https://www.zdnet.com/article/who-owns-the-code-if-chatgpts-ai-helps-write-your-app-does-it-still-belong-to-you/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/who-owns-the-code-if-chatgpts-... > OpenAI (the company behind ChatGPT) does not claim ownership of generated content. According to their terms of service, "OpenAI hereby assigns to you all its right, title and interest in and to Output." https://openai.com/policies/terms-of-use https://openai.com/policies/terms-of-use > Ownership of Content. As between you and OpenAI, and to the extent permitted by applicable law, you (a) retain your ownership rights in Input and (b) own the Output. We hereby assign to you all our right, title, and interest, if any, in and to Output.

_aavaa_ 3y ago
They can’t transfer rights to the output of it isn’t theirs to begin with. Saying they don’t claim the rights over their output while outputting large chunks verbatim is the old YouTube scheme of upload movie and say “no copyright intended”.
- JCM9 3y ago
  Exactly. And while one can easily just take down such a movie if an infringement claim is filed it’s unclear how one “removes” content from a trained model given how these models work. Thats messy.
  - _aavaa_ 3y ago
    If it’s found that the use of the material is infringing on the rights of the copyright holder than the AI company has to retrain their model without any material they don’t have a right to. Pretty clear to me
    - logicchains 3y ago
      By that logic Microsoft Word should have to refuse to save or print any text that contained copyrighted content. GPT is just a tool; the user who's asking it to produce copyrighted content (and then publishing that content) is the one violating the copyright, and they're the ones who should be liable.

shkkmo 3y ago

I would note that in the examples the NYT cites, the prompts explicitly ask for the reproduction of content. I think it makes sense to hold model makers responsible when their tools make infringement too easy to do or possible to do accidentally. However that is a far cry from requiring a little longer license to do the trainint in the first place.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]